Help Your Website Drive Better Results With Stronger SEO

The objective of good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to help your website rank higher in organic search of search engines such as Google, with the ultimate aim of gaining qualified visitors from search queries related to your products or services. It is about visibility (appearing on first few search results) and attracting visitors, without have to pay for advertisements to get clicks.

To most people, that could be all SEO is able to do, but however, there is actually a powerful link between SEO and driving online sales. When done properly, SEO can provide the added advantage of improving site conversions. Search engines like Google are increasingly placing more value on usability and outstanding content, similar to what users are valuing: ease of use and relevant content.

Here, we will explore how stronger SEO can play a part in helping your website convert better:

Attracting quality visitors through strategic keyword targeting

Suppose your SEO strategy is targeted on search terms and phrases that are relevant to your products or services, you will likely be successful in not only attracting traffic, but specifically quality visitors (customers who already have intent on looking for a particular product or service) to your website through search. Unless you are a big major brand, your SEO efforts are likely to be less focused on ranking for competitive and popular key terms that convert at very low rates, but more concerned with longer tail phrases that are extremely relevant to your products or services. Visitors who enter your website through these keyword searches are more like to find what they are looking for and as a result more likely to convert into a customer. In this circumstance, having a strategic SEO strategy can help you to attract quality visitors that have high potential to convert.

Designing landing pages that match user intent

The ultimate aim of search engines is to provide users with the most relevant and applicable search result. That means if the user is looking for “Black Adidas Bag”, Google should not return a shoe retailer’s homepage as the top result but instead a filtered product landing page populated with the different types of Black Adidas Bag. This should be the likely outcome as it contains the most relevant content that the user was searching for. By having stronger SEO, it should organically help you better match user intent by displaying the most relevant page of your website to the visitor as an entry point so that the user does not need to navigate around aimlessly from your landing page.

However, do note that if you do not have such a related landing page to match a certain set of search terms, then your website will not be able to rank for these terms. Hence, an integral part of SEO is to create these landing pages to house the content that search engines will crawl and index and eventually rank highly in searches. Creating more relevant category pages and content for potential key terms that users will search for will be good for SEO too and it will also increase the odds that the visitor will convert as these pages help him find what he needs more efficiently. These will help increase search visibility and your website’s ability to drive traffic into sales.

Improving load times to impact rankings and conversions

Google strives to provide the ideal user experience to its search engine users, and they have indicated that they take load times into account when determining rankings. All users dislike slow loading times and studies have shown that slow loading times can increase bounce rates and can have unfavourable effects on overall conversion rates as they are less likely to convert when they encounter a slow site. Google penalises websites with slow loading times, thus delivering a website with fast loading speed can deliver a positive user experience and thus increasing your ranking by Google.

Offering better mobile experiences to please algorithms and users

Nowadays, SEO require websites to provide users with intuitive mobile user experience. Since 2015, more Google searches are done from mobile phones compared to desktop. This indicates that mobile is generating more search traffic hence it is imperative that Google makes sure mobile searches return positive experiences for users. It is a known fact that having a responsive website will be highly regarded by Google and other search engines.

Hence, to maintain strong organic search ranks, companies must invest in making their website mobile responsive. A responsive website will also help visitors to navigate around easily and provide a more streamlined interface for the visitor. An improved user experience will be positive for your search engine rankings and your conversions.

Search engine optimisation and improving conversions go hand-in-hand with each other, each positively impacting one another. Search engines value usability now more than before.